‘Saturday Night Live’ review: Larry David as Bernie Sanders, Drake’s Hotline Bling, Donald Trump, and more

It’s pretty ironic for a show in “Saturday Night Live” that is being hosted by Donald Trump, it was Larry David who actually ended up stealing the show.

For the second straight episode of the show, the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star stopped by in the role of Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. We still don’t know whether or not David is really doing an impression of Sanders or just doing shtick, but it is pretty hilarious nonetheless. The entire sketch was a nice mockery of MSNBC and the forum process, which has been for the most part fairly useless when it comes to what they actually accomplish. This was a nice start to the show, and we’re going to have more soon! Refresh the page as the night goes on.

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Trump monologue – Yes, this opening was corny, and the impressions of Trump by Taran Killam and Darrell Hammond were equally so. Yet, using David to get the whole “Trump’s a racist” money bet out of the way, which has been chronicled in the headlines, was super-smart.

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Campaign sketch – Well, this was really dull, wasn’t it? There was a somewhat-edgy moment when the President of Mexico came in to give Trump a check for the wall, but for the most part this was a sketch that would have been so much better if Trump wasn’t being so conservative.

 

Bad girls – We liked it better when it was “Do It in My Twin Bad” or “Back Home Ballers.” The whole shtick here about watching the ladies pretend to be extremely edgy when they’re not is old upon third viewing.

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Trump’s live-tweeting – We will at least give the show some credit for being reasonably creative with this idea. While it was not necessarily hilarious, having the cast reacting to Trump’s “live-tweeting” of the sketch (mostly insulting things) was a nice way to play up the show-within-a-show of it all. It was completely absurd, and that was part of the fun.

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Drake Hotline bling – Hilarious, and not just because of the random Martin Short cameo. The entire spoof was a great mock-up of a certain Drake music video, complete with bad dancing and probably Trump’s best moment of the entire episode. Fittingly, it did not require much from him.

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Weekend Update – Leslie Jones was the best part, and really should host the entire show. Much of the jokes actually felt a little on-edge and awkward, and even Drunk Uncle felt a little bit dated and not that interesting.

 

Band sketch – Horrible. Maybe the worst sketch of the entire year. There was no chemistry, no fun, and so safe that it was completely useless as a sketch.

Dad singing – Slightly better than the last sketch, mostly because it largely didn’t rely on Trump and the cast members could stand on their own. Still, there was utterly no payoff and we wonder what happened to get us to this idea in the writers room.

Ex adult stars – The best idea of the night was to bring back Cecily Strong and Vanessa Bayer as their oh-so-familiar characters endorsing Donald Trump for President. There were some really good lines in here, but they were so racy and different than the rest of the show, it may be jarring to some people.

Overall, this show to us was a disaster, perpetuated and started mostly seemingly by someone in Trump’s campaign office that thought this would be a way to get him to appeal him to younger voters. We don’t really care so much about the political party; we’re reviewing this based on comedy, and there was very little to be found here.

As a general rule, we just hope that the show moving forward does not book any more people running for Presidents. Cameos are fine, but there are too many politics in here. It makes the show safe, boring, and just unfunny as a whole. Grade: D.

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